How do you solve a problem like Diablo Cody?

From Slate’s Troy Patterson, a near-mathematical formula for the dialogue written by the rising ex-stripper author of Juno:

The ideal specimen of a Diablo Cody line will feature a tension between diction and form. Though assembled with a literary wit, it will drop either a pop-culture allusion (often chosen for its kitsch value) or slang that's just slightly anachronistic, and it will flaunt the casualness of the dropping. It is pleased with its own cleverness almost to the point of hostility, sneering as it snaps past.

So, here, we get, "Sometimes you make me feel like I'm living in a Lifetime lady-tampon movie"; "That dude is such a waste of hair product"; "I've been diggin' around your closest for an hour, and I still can't fuckin' get to Narnia"; "cluck-cluck" (as a synonym for fried chicken); "Sudoku" (as a racial slur); "Jell-O Pudding is for the children" (said in Bill Cosby's voice); and—this is T explaining how Tara found out that her daughter took a morning-after pill—"She went all CSI in that pubic thatch you call a backpack." For whatever reason, Cody has front-loaded her scripts with this stuff—is she trying to alienate the audience?

It is mystifying that more viewers don’t find this style impossibly unpleasant. One-liners used to be a kind of feat of mental strength, the comedy equivalent of watching a man pull a truck across the road with his teeth. Nobody is as witty as Groucho Marx—you watch a Marx Brothers movie to see, among other things, a remarkable intellect at work, someone who speaks in an endless string of witticisms and obliterates anyone who attempts conversation with him.

Now we watch insufferable comic stars babbling in a way that can only be described with the unfortunate buzzword of postmodern social interactions: “awkward.” But a kind of meta-awkward, a spastic conversation about how awkward the conversation is. You will see this in The Office, Saturday Night Live, and every Will Ferrell movie.

Cody’s lines go a step further: they turn wit into a pretentiousness contest—who can make the most arcane reference possible and turn weirdness into an affable quirk. This woman is abolishing subcultures right and left—actually, she’s waging war against culture in general. We will no longer be able to use culture to represent our commitments. No longer can people simply say, “I listen to Joy Division,” when they mean to say, “I cut myself.” Gone are the days that I could go to a cocktail party and say “I think ‘Hollaback Girl’ is the a greater musical achievement than the entire corpus of Bob Dylan,” and have the satisfaction of everyone leaving me alone. Now, thanks to cynical postmodern comedy, these very profound cultural significations have dissolved into the meaningless banter and quirky individualistic personalities that make us “awkward.”

It could be nice if life imitated art. It doesn’t. Art is stupid and unoriginal, and ends up stealing its ideas from life. I have to spend the whole day listening to people dropping cynical textual references and saying things like “I’m kind of a big deal.” Please stop putting me through it at the movies.